Free Read
A Justified Sin
Chapter 1
Victoria Smith
I’ll bet steam blew out with his commands. Nana said it was freezing that morning, as the sun struggled to summit the Wasatch mountains flanking Salt Lake’s eastern geography.
My grandmother, Nana, didn’t hear Deputy Shettler’s words. He was several hundred feet distant, insulated behind thick, stone walls. Nana was only fifteen then, having slipped aboard earth the first year of the twentieth century. But her mother read her an accounting the next day, in the November 20, 1915, issue of the Salt Lake Telegram.
“Ready, aim…” were Shettler’s words, and I imagine they were delivered with stony tension. The part of the story that caught everyone by surprise was that the condemned man himself gave the final order. “Fire,” he shouted. “Go ahead and fire!”
Joe Hill’s final roar was the culmination of a life of courageous defiance. Nana was too far away to hear his audacious yelps, but the sharp crack of the firing squad was a shock she would never forget.
* * *
I lay in the sweet-smelling Kentucky bluegrass that blanketed the elevations of Sugar House Park and squinted at the wide, azure sky. Nana had grown up in the nearby Redondo Avenue home and inherited it when her folks passed. That’s where she was the morning she’d heard Joe’s execution. I was less than two football fields south, in the rapturous haven I always roamed when visiting my only living grandmother. I could never shake the odd notion that all this verdant acreage had once been the site of Utah’s first state penitentiary. I lollygagged, free as the bountiful gulls above maneuvering in graceful, Jonathan Livingston acrobatics, yet on the very grounds where Joe Hill spent the last year of his life jailed.
Jaunty, boyish chatter snared my attention, and I rolled onto my stomach to investigate. I balled my fists, placing one atop the other to gain a perch for my chin, giving me elevation enough to see but stealth enough not to be seen, at least not easily. A river of fragrance from the neighborhoods abutting the park floated waves of honeysuckle and lilac across my sanctuary, sliding me into a new emotional chapter. I was happy to leave the depressing story of Joe behind and transfer my heart to the intoxicating here and now. There were five of them, about my age, parading at a relaxed pace near the park’s meandering roadway. Less than a hundred feet away, they performed the antics of young boys afraid of nothing in a world made just for them, and I found my mind thirsty for a taste of their escapading.
It was June 1972, two days since daylight’s apex began its slow retreat toward fall’s equinox. I was fourteen; in less than four months, I’d be fifteen. The significance of gender had only recently awakened in my awareness—its ungainly admittance scaring the bejesus out of me and all my friends, like I suspect it’d been doing to kids around the world for millennia. I had a particularly obstinate challenge in this new province since I was pretty. According to my mom and dad, “dangerously pretty.” I didn’t do anything to earn my outward appearance other than be born from a certain combination of genes. My entire contribution was to brush my thick mane of wheat-blonde hair that ran halfway down my back in a wavy cascade. Nana said it was strawberry blonde in the house and almost yellow in bright sunlight.
I’d had a smooth go of life so far that dated clear back to my birth, until this gender business started hogging center stage. My mom was a free spirit who’d been turned off by her hospital birthing experience with my big sister, Maria. Irritating fluorescent lights, machines that beeped and buzzed, and too many caretakers that had looked concerned and agitated, put the kibosh on a repeat performance. Once was enough down that sterile path, and when it came time for me, she asked her midwife friend, Sally, to preside over an at-home delivery. I guess I had the best seat in the house, but my eyes were closed. Later, Mom told me the highlights which were few. The upshot, so to speak, was that she was so relaxed, and I so ripe, that I practically flung myself into Sally’s hands. No screams or gross, painful contractions. Instead, in her own darkened bedroom, the sac broke and out I flooded like a kayaker through a culvert.
Now, nearly fifteen years later, it annoyed me that I didn’t have thousands of hours invested in ballet, or gymnastics, or high jumping, but was treated with Olympic champion celebrity anyway because of my looks. Boys were mostly terrified of me. Untangling that awkward interval was a struggle that infected teenagers pretty much universally—once the pin got pulled on that hormone hand grenade, a solid focus on the rest of life was pretty much off the table for a while.
I couldn’t believe this little gang would be scared, especially since the distinct odor of pot followed in their wake, and it was too beautiful a day to be afraid of anything. They’d made it almost to the duck pond by the time I decided to accidentally intercept them. I got up and brushed the fresh grass off my clothes, then set a course that took me directly across the middle of the grounds, so our rendezvous would be on the park’s south side.
Nearing one of the pavilions, I could see my plan was unfolding as perfectly as a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. I was close enough now to see the whole gang’s eyes bloomed with swollen blood veins that Visine promised it could “get out.” These hippie kids were not the least abashed by me and, in fact, absorbed me into their clique without so much as a blush. That was fabulously tantalizing to my youthful innocence. My heart warmed as if the sun’s rays shined inside me, and my faltering conviction about boys began an about-face. Our whimsical troupe soon happened upon a shady spot under some tall cottonwood trees where we plunked down and began passing a killer joint around. The ethereal aroma of burning pot mixed with the park’s fresh-cut lawns to install a memory whose window opens wide whenever I smell marijuana to this day.
My mom used to tell me my eyes were cobalt blue. The cannabis did a number on that according to the reflection I saw in my compact. I looked just like my new friends.
Geoff, apparently the ringleader, sported eyes about the same color as mine, except right now they appeared closer to the pink of rare steaks. Crowning his head was a halo of sand-colored, curly hair somewhere between Art Garfunkel and Jimi Hendrix in dimension. He introduced himself and then asked if he and his friends could guess my name. In my high state, that sounded like a fun game, so I said “sure.”
A short fellow they called Tuck sung out, “Daphanie?”
“No.” I laughed. “I’m from this side of the Atlantic.”
“Beatrice?”
“No.”
“Guinevere?”
“No.”
“Goldilocks?”
“You guys!”
Geoff giggled, rosy-cheeked, along with the increasingly silly jests, and said he’d bet me a kiss he could guess it first try.
“So, if you guess it, you get to kiss me?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“Then you get to kiss me.”
“Nice try, silly head. How about if you lose, I get the rest of that bag of pot in your pocket?”
“What would you do with that much grass, Blue Eyes?”
“Wait, was that your guess?”
“No, no, no. Here’s my guess. Ready?”
“Shoot,” I said.
“Victoria.”
“You cheated!” I yelled as the joint was passed to me again. “How’d you know?” I asked, then took a long drag and held it.
“First, the kiss. Then I’ll tell.”
I was stoned enough to play along so blew the smoke out in Geoff’s face. He leaned through the fragrant mist and gave me a peck on the lips. This was a brand-new experience for me that added a pinch of naughtiness to my adventure. I didn’t feel the least threatened, everyone being so nice and all.
“When you were peeking at your mirror, I took a gander into your purse. There’s a key in there with a tag tied to it. Your name’s on the tag.”
“See, I knew you cheated. I want my kiss back.”
“Okay,” he said, and leaned over and kissed me again. “Now we’re even.”
Everyone was laughing except me and Tuck. He looked as confused as I felt. I looked around at all the friendly faces and decided for once, I wasn’t going to analyze everything. I was feeling not just content, but genuinely happy, maybe even euphoric.
“Do you go by Vicky, or do you use all four syllables of that candy-coated thing?” Geoff asked.
“Victoria—the whole shootin’ match. It’s what everyone calls me. You don’t like it?”
“I like it fine,” Geoff said, taking a big puff of weed.
Then, in a nonchalant gesture, he leaned over to hand me the reefer, and with half-held breath, he wheezed, “Here you go, Richard,” and BAM, it stuck like a dimwit’s tongue to a frost-covered lamppost. Not a kid in that ragtag circle missed an opportunity to use the new moniker, and by the final round, when the joint was a tiny stub that stained our small fingers with its resin, tears rolled down every face in the group as the pot’s exaggerative qualities made it the joke of the century.
We all got wicked thirsty after a while and went off in search of water. There were plenty of fountains throughout the park, so it was an easy enough mission. I lost track of how many laps we made around that hundred and some acres that used to be a prison. We weren’t keeping very good track of anything, including lame attempts at conversation, often ruptured mid-sentence. “What was I saying?” any of us would blurt out after a long pause that no one had noticed. Repeatedly, whatever the thread had been vanished without a trace, and our swirly minds feasted on the hilarity of our own delirium. That is, until the munchies struck with ferocity. Geoff and his troupe invited me to go with them to the Colonel’s for fried chicken and biscuits. But I’d already left Nana alone too long, and her pantry sounded a lot healthier, even if my mouth craved anything deep fried. So, we began the dissolution of our impromptu circus and traded phone numbers and where we went to school—I went to Rowland Hall, they to Churchill—and made a pact to meet again.
Approaching the park’s entrance, Geoff said, “You have the most striking blue eyes. I’d hardly imagine such a lovely face could find a perch on somebody called Richard. Where’d you ever get such a weird name?”
He consumed his own wit with grand generosity and I noticed tears joining his unrestrained laughter. Yes, it seems I’d become “Richard,” its sour tang already rinsed from my mouth. To answer his question, I was aghast to hear hee-haws escaping from me like a donkey. Those would normally have melted me in embarrassment, but they seemed perfectly licit then.
“Well, you’re too pretty and too nice to have that old clunker, but I’m afraid you’re stuck with it. I have this unintentional gift for giving people sticky nicknames. Sorry.”
That made me think of something my mom used to tell me. My eyes were the color of mountain larkspur, “the most stunning blue in all the universe,” she said. She seemed to switch back and forth between that and the cobalt. But in the same breath she warned me that the perennial, cherished and coveted by bees and hummingbirds, was fiercely poisonous to humans. She found cause from time to time to remind me that I had some of that stashed away inside me. “I’ve seen it peeking out, like it wants a shot at the action. Be careful when you find it puffing up; it could land you in trouble.”
Sure, I thought. Little old me? When I see a pig with flapping wings, maybe then I’ll worry.
Chapter 2
Richard Smith
“Richard! My heavens, what kind of name is that for a lovely young lady?”
That was as close to incensed as I could remember ever seeing Nana. But the funny thing was, later, after I recounted the parts of my morning that steered clear of illegal doings, she accidentally used it.
“Would you mind helping me hang the laundry, Richard? Oh, land sakes alive! I mean, Victoria.”
Geoff was right. His nicknaming appeared to have supernatural powers that burrowed deep. Like some alien virus from Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, it snuck into common use among my family and friends and there seemed to be no antidote. By the end of tenth grade, even my teachers were using it. I not only got used to it, but found myself more and more entertained by the notoriety it conveyed.
* * *
“YAAAHOOO!” I screamed, my hands smashed vise-tight against my ears. The A-4 Skyhawks flown by the Navy’s Blue Angels demonstration team filled the sky above in a furious dance that flipped a one-way switch inside me.
It was Saturday, the sixteenth of August, 1975. My family and I were at an airshow at Hill Air Force Base, in Ogden, forty miles north of Salt Lake City. Crazy thoughts lit up inside me. I knew at the time it was an impossible dream. Girls could be stewardesses, not pilots. But a strong obsession blossomed as smoke threaded a few acres of sky that cracked in symphonies of thunder. According to Archimedes, a long enough lever could move the world. Smart guy, and I was a smart girl. Whatever size crowbar I needed, I knew I’d find—I was going to be a pilot.
On Monday, August 18th, at the Naval recruiting office on 3rd West in Salt Lake City, Petty Officer Samuels laughed when I asked where I could sign up to be a naval aviator.
“What’s your name again, young lady? Richard?” Samuels’s eyebrows reached halfway to his hairline.
“It’s Victoria Smith. Richard’s my nickname. It’s what everyone calls me.”
“Are you old enough to drive, Ms. Smith?”
“Very funny. Ha ha. I got my license almost two years ago.”
“So, you’re 18?”
“I will be in less than two months, on October 12th. I’ve done my homework. I know about Barbara Allen. She broke into this navy’s flying club over a year ago.”
“Yes, and she was a college graduate and twenty-two years old when she got accepted into Naval Officer Candidate’s School, and the Vietnam war was still raging.” He looked at his watch and stood up. “Ms. Smith, I admire your ambition and could look at you all day. You’re the prettiest applicant that’s ever walked through those doors, that I guarantee. But you’re not getting into any naval flight program at least until you’re through college and we’ve thinned our ranks considerably. With all our pilots back from Vietnam, we’re way over quota.”
“Mr.…”
“Ma’am, it’s Petty Officer Samuels. You better learn at least that much if you’re going to be visiting other military outfits. The protocols are strict.”
“Petty Officer Samuels, can you suggest another route to a cockpit? I’m not gonna quit just because the war’s over.”
“Yes, I can, Ms. Smith. Alaska. Go up there and get a floatplane rating.”
“Really?” I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. It seemed like an outrageous suggestion.
“Really.”
I smiled and shook Samuels’s outstretched hand. I knew I overdid it, but flat out couldn’t control myself. I pumped that enormous paw like I was trying to get five gallons a minute out of Uncle Phil’s well, which made him smile.
As I turned to leave, Samuels yelled, “Richard,” with shocking military verve.
I skidded to a stop and turned to face him.
“Good luck!”
Wow! My ears heard, “Congratulations on your flying career.” I hurried out anxious to replay that validating quip in my head a few hundred times.
Chapter 3
Richard Smith
I graduated from high school in June of 1976. My mom and dad tried everything they could think of to get me to change my mind. Four years at the University of Utah and I’d never have to pay them back, season passes at the ski resort of my choice, my own horse, even a new car. There was no persuasion that could un-sear the dream burned into my heart. I’d done some studying and made a couple of phone calls and learned that “The Great Alaskan Bush Company” in Anchorage was hiring strippers. They were always hiring strippers. It was strictly nighttime work and paid a fortune. I promised Mom and Dad I’d take it if they didn’t turn loose of some of that capital so I could take flying lessons.
* * *
It took nine days to drive 3012 miles to Anchorage in my 1969 Volkswagen Beetle. More than a thousand miles of it on washboard dirt road. The dirt ended at Haines Junction, where my Bug, and butt, gratefully accepted asphalt under us again. Right where the dirt road ended, there was a gas station with a carwash. A quarter there bought three minutes of high-pressure spray from a wand that almost knocked me over the first time I pulled the trigger. By the fourth quarter, I could tell my car was yellow. Two more and the Mounties could read my license plates.
A couple more days would get me to the end of the rainbow. Whenever monotony threatened to kill my buzz, I reached over and opened the glove box to look at the thick white envelope stuffed with twenty hundred-dollar bills. There, by God’s, my future. How many times I looked was uncountable.
I found a basement studio apartment on Spenard Road for forty dollars a month including utilities. It was three hundred square feet of dank, dark concrete that smelled like rotten fish and sex parties. There was a single mattress on the floor in one corner that I dragged out to the alley between my building and the bar next door. A world of infectious disease had to inhabit that yellow-stained relic, and I had it evicted inside of five minutes. A motel two blocks south sold me one of theirs since they were remodeling and tossing out all their old ones. Five bucks. Not bad.
While it was walking distance to Lake Hood, where all the floatplanes in the world appeared to be stashed, the traffic on the busy roadways made pedestrian travel too treacherous. I drove. Five minutes, four of them at traffic lights.
As much as I’ve always bulldozed around hoping to affect an impression of fearlessness, sometimes it was a lie. In truth, I was acutely aware that women, especially young women, were targets of an ugly conglomeration of evil sleazeballs. Fear sucks. Terror’s worse. Wits helped, but nothing cured. I lived with it.
I parked in a large gravel lot from which any of a dozen floatplane schools were an easy walk. A plane was idling toward a dock right in front of me, so I ambled down to get a closer look. The propeller was turning slow enough to catch the sun and send blades of light slamming into my eyes, along with blinding reflections off the little wake the pontoons furrowed in the water. My heart was working its way up my throat, its beat approaching a sprint as it became obvious it was coming right for me. I’d never seen a plane from this close. It was tiny, barely wide enough for one person. When it was thirty or forty feet out, I could see the pilot. His red hair surrounded his head like a lion’s mane, his beard had to be at least ten inches long, and it shook as he spoke—to who or what I didn’t know. On the right side of the plane, half a clamshell door flew open and was pushed upward to catch some kind of clasp under the right wing. It stuck and then the lower of the doors dropped down and rested on the side of the plane. The arm manipulating them didn’t appear to belong to the lion, a puzzle solved as the plane began turning to the left revealing that there were two men, the second in a seat behind the redhead. The back guy climbed out onto a pontoon as the propeller stopped, grabbed a coiled rope from inside somewhere, and yelled, “Hey you, catch!” He flung the rope, which, in my excitement, I fumbled but managed to grab before it slithered into the water. He kept one end for himself. “Hold tight, ma’am,” and he eased the plane right up to the dock with a gentle tug on the rope. The craft slowed and pivoted so perfectly I doubt he ever needed me.
“Manfred Bates,” he said stepping onto the dock. “Thanks for the help.”
After he tied the plane to some cleats, he hollered in a giant outdoor voice, “Get outta there, Andy, lesson’s over. Make sure you get the mags ’n’ master, and try not to drop the keys this time.”
While Andy was clambering out, Manfred looked over. “Can I help you?”
His stature was a lot bigger than his sentences, not that he was rude. He just seemed busy.
“I sure hope so. I’m looking to learn how to fly one of these.” I would have preferred my voice didn’t climb an octave, but that’s what nerves did to me. Always had.
“I’m darned busy right now, ma’am. Full up, really. So’s everyone up here. That’s how summers work around this neck of the woods.”
“Excuse me, lady, but I’d like to finish my lesson,” Andy said, placing himself between me and the instructor. I suppose he was trying to recover some of his macho from the dropped keys taunt a minute ago.
Lake Hood was freshwater, but the Gulf of Alaska, the part of it called The Cook Inlet, was less than a mile away, and the westerly breeze brought its bouquet in knockout proportions for a Utah girl that loved seafood. Driving up had given me time to acclimate to the long daylight hours, but they still thrilled me. I could tell already, I was Alaska stuff. One rude guy wasn’t gonna faze me. It fazed Manfred though.
“Andy, you’re a good guy and a decent student, but your mouth’s bound to get you in trouble if you don’t learn to temper it some.” He looked around Andy at me. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t return his glance. It seemed too much like ganging up on poor Andy, and I didn’t want to start off making enemies my first day. “We tend to like our ladies around here and try to treat them respectfully.”
“Sorry. That landing kind of pissed me off. You’d think I’d have the hang of ’em by now, but that was another splashdown worthy of a returning Apollo capsule. Sorry, lady.”
As we approached a small building with a sign advertising Alaska Floats and Skis, Manfred said, “Well, if we haven’t shook you yet, I guess we ought to get acquainted. You got me and Andy’s name, but we never got yours.”
“I’m Richard Smith, from Salt Lake City.”
“Richard!” Manfred said, wide-eyed. “I’ve heard you folks have some quirky views on marriage ’n’ whatnot down there. Did y’all dispense with gender specific names too?”
“Sorry, it’s become so natural to me I forget how crazy it is. It’s a nickname I got from a guy a few years ago and man, did it stick. Mormons had nothing to do with it. My given name’s Victoria.”
“Well Richard, I’ve got some work to finish up with Andy. If you wanna hang out, be my guest. There’s a lotta cool planes scattered around the docks and hangars if you want to snoop around awhile. I’ll find you when I’m done.”
* * *
That was June 21st, the longest day of the year. You never even needed your headlights in Anchorage that time of year. Manfred decided to work me into his schedule. I think he wanted bragging rights for having a female student named Richard. Such an anomaly could win him a lot of beers at the F Street Station.
To get my private pilot’s license with a float plane add-on rating would cost $2,500 if I paid it all up front. It’d be over three grand if I paid by the hour. I offered him $2,000 now, which took my entire stash, and I’d work the rest off if he could find jobs for me. I guess he liked me enough to agree. I went to get the thick white envelope out of my car.
Nobody’d bothered to mention I was in the vagrants’ side of town though I shoulda had a clue from the condition of my apartment. I’d soon learn, but not soon enough, that a lot of druggies hung out around there looking for opportunity. Most of the cars parked at Lake Hood belonged to pilots who were off in the wilds of Alaska. It was a target rich venue for thieves. Approaching my yellow Bug, I was surprised to see the passenger’s door hanging open. I must’ve forgotten to lock it in my excitement. The glove box yawned at me. The envelope was gone.